Posts Tagged ‘life’

The teacher that had the courage and drive to make this heartfelt and inspirational video must be congratulated. Catherine Hogan, a teacher from Lindsay Place, has captured the very essence of what drives a caring, passionate teacher and her message is bound to alter some misconceptions felt by many students and parents. I was deeply moved and touched by this poignant and heartwarming clip.

Please watch this video and get your friends and family to do the same. Please notify others about its existence on Facebook and other social media devices. Only 12,624 have watched it from YouTube as I write this. This number doesn’t properly do justice to the quality and raw power of the clip.

Our generation took body consciousness to a whole new level, with quite devastating results. We were taught to judge others not by the breadth of their character but by the size and shape of their bodies. It saddens me that this obsessive desire to look a certain way has seemingly overridden the desire of being a good person, resisting to gossip, being truthful and loyal to the people around us and acting with integrity. We live in a society where people would sell their souls for a preferred dress size and confidence is based on form and complexion over character development.

The internet is awash with pro-anorexia websites which thousands of girls – some as young as six – are using to compete against each other in deadly starvation games, a study has found.

More than 500 of these ‘gruesome’ sites exist and encourage vulnerable young women to barely eat and just drink coffee, smoke and take diet pills to look like a ‘goddess’.

Using the phrase ‘starving for perfection’ they say users should eat no more than 500 calories a day – the recommended level is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.

They also include ‘thinspiration’ sections with images of super-slim women and in the last year 500,000 girls have admitted visiting them, and one in five were aged between six and 11.

University Campus Suffolk in Ipswich has carried out research into the issue and found than many of these websites are set up by people with anorexia and other eating disorders.

‘It starts with an individual who wants to share their experience and as they get a following they set themselves up as almost Goddess-like,’ researcher Dr Emma Bond, senior lecturer in childhood and youth studies said.

‘When I started this research last January I came across a website set up by a girl who was disgusted with herself because she had put on a few pounds at Christmas. She planned to fast for three days and regain control.

‘In under two hours, she had 36 followers saying things like “You’re wonderful, you’re an inspiration to me, I’m only fasting because of you”.’

Some of the people are even posting pictures of themselves in very few clothes on thousands of blogs and on social media like Twitter.

Official figures show that one in 200 women and one in 2,000 men have anorexia – which means they starve themselves or exercise excessively to stay slim – although some experts believe the true number is much higher.

Around eight per cent of women and one per cent of men develop bulimia at some point. They binge on excessive amounts of food then make themselves sick or use laxatives to stop gaining weight.

Many sufferers of eating disorders hide their problem from family and friends by pretending they have already eaten to avoid meals and wearing baggy clothes to conceal their skeletal shape.

Doctors believe that anorexia or bulimia is more common in people who are perfectionists, tend to worry a lot or are often depressed.

As addictions go, internet addiction is relatively new. Since we all love to spend time surfing the net and we see it as a natural and normal form of relaxation many ignore what is becoming a very serious problem. Children are spending far too long in front of a screen, often skipping meals, becoming sleep deprived and sometimes even defecating in their pants in order to avoid missing precious minutes of a peer-to-peer game or social chat session.

ONE in five Aussie kids spend so much time surfing the internet that they miss out on meals and sleep, a study shows.

Edith Cowan University researchers have revealed that “excessive internet use” is twice as common in Australian children as British kids.

A fifth of the Australian children surveyed said they had “gone without eating or sleeping because of the internet”.

More than half confessed they waste so much time online that they “have spent less time than I should have” with family, friends or doing homework.

Sixty per cent said they had caught themselves surfing when they were “not really interested”.

And half “felt bothered” when they could not get online.

Internet obsession appears to peak at the age of 13 to 14, the study shows, as children start high school and use the internet more for homework and social networking with friends.

I was staggered to read of the rising numbers of underage rapists, some of which are as young as 10 years-old. How can this be happening? As a Primary School teacher it is absolutely unfathomable that children that young could commit such an atrocious act.

Surely online pornography is just a quick and easy excuse. It must be more complicated than that:

Children as young as ten are being arrested on suspicion of rape amid fears that online pornography is twisting their view of sex and relationships.

The scale of sexual offences committed by primary school children was revealed in disturbing figures from police forces across the country.

Twenty-four forces arrested children under 13 for suspected rape in the past year while seven detained at least one ten year old.

The figures, obtained by the Daily Mail under a Freedom of Information request, highlight growing concerns at the influence of online pornography on impressionable young minds.

Yesterday NSPCC spokesman Jon Brown said there was ‘undoubtedly’ a link between children carrying out sexual assaults and easy access to online pornography, which gives them a ‘distorted picture of what sexual relationships should be about’.

John Carr, from the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, said: ‘There is already a widespread feeling that the internet is playing an unhealthy part in the early sexualisation of children and these revelations about the arrests of ten-year-olds for rape will add fuel to the flames.’

The figures were uncovered in a survey of all 52 police forces across Britain.

Of the 39 that responded, 31 forces had arrested children between the ages of ten and 13 on suspicion of rape in the past year.

Seven said the youngest child arrested for rape was aged just ten while six said the youngest was 11, and 11 forces said the youngest suspect was 12.

Forces reported only the age of the youngest child they had arrested for the crime, meaning the actual number of very young children detained in each age group could be much higher.

According to the figures, 357 children aged 18 and under were found guilty of a range of sex crimes including rape, sexual assaults on other children, grooming, incest and taking or possessing indecent photographs of minors.

A short little piece inspired by the tenth student in fifteen minutes to inquire about a test.

1. Have you graded our tests yet?

No. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a Scantron machine. Good thing, too, because to my knowledge, Scantron machines cannot grade short answer or essay questions which make up the bulk of your test. And while I do consider myself a reasonably intelligent human being I have not yet perfected my reading skills to complete ninety, four-page tests in one hour (which is exactly how long it has been since you walked out of my classroom) even if I weren’t teaching the rest of the day or preparing your classes for tomorrow. I reassure you that the second the tests are graded, the grades will be posted online because (also contrary to popular belief) I have better things to do than get my kicks by…

Like this:

Many in society figure that since divorce is very common nowadays that the effects on children are far reduced. This is not the case. A child can be in a classroom full of children from broken homes. It doesn’t make their personal pain any less tangible:

Family breakdown is as devastating for today’s children as it was when divorce was a source of social disgrace, a state-backed report warned yesterday.

Even though divorce is no longer considered ‘shameful’ – as it was until the 1970s – the children of broken families continue to suffer destructive effects throughout their lives, the report said.

The paper, produced by a team of senior academics, found that the damage caused to a child by divorce continues to blight his or her life as far as old age.

It said parental separation in childhood was ‘consistently associated with psychological distress in adulthood during people’s early 30s’.

The report added: ‘This seems to be true even across different generations, which suggests that as divorce and separation have become more common, their impact on mental health has not reduced.’

It comes a week after figures were published showing that almost half of all children have now seen their parents break up by the time they are 15.

The report said that good health depends on lifestyle conditions that it termed ‘social medicines’. Key among these is a stable family background.

The findings undermine the claims of politicians, lawyers and activists who have argued for years that divorce causes no harm to children if parents part amicably and without conflict.

‘Family life has undergone dramatic changes over recent decades,’ the report, produced by a team led by Professor Mel Bartley, said.

‘Families no longer have to have two parents, they can contain children from different parents, and parents no longer have to be of different genders.’

But it warned: ‘More freedom also means less certainty, and this has led to concerns about the impact of family stability on the health and well-being of both children and adults.

‘Family living arrangements are related to children’s physical health.

Two drama teachers were sacked for allowing GCSE students perform in a play involving depictions of rape, oral sex and child abuse within a family in front of their parents and classmates.

The play – which even featured a pupil acting out the role of a father sexually abusing his daughter – shocked teachers, upset parents and left children sobbing and vomiting in distress.

Complaints were made and the two unnamed teachers, who were supervising the 15 and 16-year-olds who wrote and acted in the play, were sacked by the school for gross misconduct.

They are now pursuing unfair dismissal claims – but the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruled this week that a previous decision in their favour was ‘perverse’ and that their cases must be re-heard.

The teachers taught drama at an unidentified school. One was head of the department – and they were responsible for supervising GCSE students in writing, rehearsal, production and performance.

The ‘age-inappropriate’ material included graphic descriptions of sex, rape, oral sex between father and daughter, child abuse between parents and children, and group sex within a family, EAT judge Lady Smith said.

A showcase of the work was held in front of friends and relatives, but the department head failed to warn those invited of the potentially disturbing nature of the production.

Even the headteacher of the school was not told about the content and was unaware of what the students had been involved in until after the showcase, Lady Smith said.

TEACHERS are filling lessons, report cards and letters home with errors, including SMS-style spelling, grammatical mistakes and misspelt spelling lists, parents have claimed.

A survey of 480 people about the literacy skills of the nation’s teachers found half thought the quality was poor.

More than 40 per cent had noticed spelling or grammatical errors on letters sent home from school and 35 per cent had seen mistakes in report cards and marked assignments.

Other parents claimed their child’s teachers lacked passion and skill, taught incorrect information and provided misspelt word lists for children to learn from. Some had even noticed teachers using SMS-style spellings, like l8r (later) and coz (because).

The “must do better” grading comes as the federal government reveals current teachers will be given specialist training to make sure future educators get better mentoring.Current and ex-teachers who took the survey were among those who complained about substandard quality, saying it was depressing.

One teacher from a state high school said many graduate teachers lacked a basic understanding of grammar, spelling and punctuation through their own schooling.

“It’s those 20-somethings who just missed out and I’m scared that they’re going to be teaching my kids,” she said.